This is not cinema for the ages but I think it’s worth seeing, both for the pretty standard superficial but satisfying uplift narrative (irrepressible young people with crappy lives in a dead-end town bond and find some joy in creativity) and more importantly for starting much more interesting conversations about cultural appropriation and representation. Patti Cake$ is a white girl who wants to rap, or rather, more specifically, who wants to be a rap star. Her hero is the kingmaker rap star O-Z, who is black. Now, if Patti were a rich and skinny white girl from Beverly Hills or Tribeca, you’d be hating on her already for trying to appropriate black rap culture for herself. But she’s overweight and working poor from sludgy New Jersey, which maybe leads you to suspend that snap judgment and root for her instead? Maybe you think of her as a human being who loves the music, has some talent, and deserves a break and you hold back from unloading the Iggy Azalea critique on her? (Side note: Danielle Macdonald is also Australian.) Or maybe you don’t, maybe you point out that she treats both of the two black males she encounters — one of them very powerful, the other powerless — as owing her something, and that also — ahem — she’s not a very good rapper. In the end, the movie finds a middle way through this thicket which I could easily spin as a self-excusing cop-out or as insightful, inclusive, and respectful. Check it for yourself and see what you think. Oh finally just need to add that I love Bridget Everett so much.
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Argh I’m just awful at keeping up with this. These are things I remember from 2018 so far. Maybe I’ll be better in the summer about making a note here and there.
I’ve got a phone, a tablet, a laptop, a desktop, and a TV in my house, and any one of them is capable of delivering torrents of video from a variety of sources. A fly on my wall would note my oddly contradictory responses to this cornucopia. On the one hand, I’m an indiscriminate Hoover, in that I’ll start watching just about anything. On the other hand, I seem to have become increasingly discerning, or distractible, in that I am rarely sufficiently engaged to finish anything. I watched one third of The Young Pope, only to be distracted by the appearance of the new season of Orange is the New Black, which I got halfway through before being suddenly struck by an inexplicable need to see all of Bertolucci again, a project I abandoned almost immediately after reading somewhere that I should instead be watching Paolo Sorrentino’s movies, which reminded me that I never finished The Young Pope, but when I tried to go back to it I somehow instead spent a whole week watching the first twenty minutes each of a hundred subtitled European cop shows on Netflix.
Like most everything Charlie Kaufman does, this is so wrong yet so right. The sad and simple story could come from Updike, or maybe Dreiser, or, if it were a little funnier and not so very American, from Chekhov. The author of a half-baked but successful book on marketing arrives in Cincinnati (starring as the epitome of flyover country: “See the zoo!” “Try the chili!”) to give a paid lecture to a convention of phone bank managers. He’s an utterly typical disappointed mid-life crisis type, unhappy with his perfectly fine family, desperate to feel like he’s still attractive. He calls up an old flame who lives in town and invites her for a drink; when he propositions her, she rightly chews him out and leaves. Desperate, he hooks up with a naive telemarketer who sees him as a celebrity: just his type. After they fool around, he gets histrionic and hyperbolic and decides she’s the love of his life, he’s leaving his wife, but of course she isn’t and he doesn’t. There’s a little bit more — some kind of paranoia about invisible forces pulling strings in the basement — but that’s just normal Kaufman neurotic epiphenomena. It’s all pretty straightforward, right? Sure it is.
